Every human, every New Yorker, every new American has a story about New York or how they came to New York.

On this page, you can experience some of these stories for yourself.

Each story and video here is written or filmed from the perspective of one member of the Andrew Romay New Immigrant Center of the English-Speaking Union. Stories, essays and poems were created in our special English as a Second Language classes: Writing Skills class, taught by Angela Wilkins, and English Through Printed Media, taught by Robert Speziale.

All video submissions were filmed, edited and produced by ARNIC members who have experience in documentary filmmaking. Our volunteer, a freelance videographer, Scott Luxor provided support for all video projects.

Yunbok

The invitation
to the US

Everything
was familiar and comfortable for us. We had all we needed in our country; a comfortable
house, warm communities, delicious foods, easy mother-tongue, etc. The invitation
to the US has changed the lives of our family dramatically. We have suffered
from culture shock. We have needed to learn everything in English again. We
have been separated from all the acquainted things. We have resettled
everything from the beginning. We can still keep in touch with friends and
relatives by phone, but they are living in another world. We can still talk in
our language, but it is a minority language here. We had to learn different
customs, not to misbehave in the US. We had to be perceptive and thoughtful in
order to communicate only in short English sentences. We had to be accustomed
to difference not similarity.

However, we
have been learning every day from many new meetings and findings. Every evening,
we communicate our exciting experiences of New York City. We are doing better
every day. We encourage each other every day: “Good job, good job”. We trust
God, because we can no longer rely on our knowledge and experience. We dream
every day because we believe in God’s good will for us. We are looking forward
to saying “the invitation to the US has changed our life completely but it was
an awesome blessing”.